■ ECONOMY
Lien to lead group to China
Former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairman Lien Chan (連戰) is scheduled to lead a delegation to attend a Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-KMT economic forum on Dec. 20 and Dec. 21. The CCP-KMT economic forum, initiated by Lien and Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) and first held in 2006, is scheduled to be held in Shanghai this year, the KMT said yesterday. The party announced that Lien will leave for China on Dec. 14 and visit Tianjin and Hangzhou before attending the forum in Shanghai. Lien reached a consensus with Hu on the holding of regular KMT-CCP meetings during his first visit to Beijing in 2005. Lien stressed the importance of the KMT-CCP forum in pushing cross-strait cooperation when he attended an APEC meeting last month.
■ DIPLOMACY
Hau inks sister city pact
Taipei City has established sister city links with Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, and will donate ambulances to help improve medical conditions there, Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) announced yesterday. Hau said at a signing ceremony that the two cities first established ties in 2002 during a visit to Taipei by the mayor of Ouagadougou and that the new alliance would further enhance mutual trust and facilitate partnerships between the two diplomatic allies. The two cities are expected to launch various initiatives and collaborate in areas such as public affairs management, information technology, transportation, the environment and health, Hau said. As a first step, Hau pledged that Taipei would donate four ambulances to Ouagadougou and would assist with the construction of a youth center in the African city, known for its craftsmanship, to provide a space for its culture to thrive.
■ EVENTS
Gay rights carnival today
In an effort to promote gay rights in Kaohsiung, the city government and the Gender/Sexuality Rights Association, Taiwan is organizing a carnival from 1pm to 5pm in front of the Kaohsiung Film Archive today, the association said in a press release yesterday. As gay and lesbians still face severe discrimination in society, the association hopes to promote gay-friendliness and bridge understandings between gays and non-gays through games featuring gay-related issues at the carnival. The group has chosen Kaohsiung to hold the event because it sees Kaohsiung as the city with the most diversity in southern Taiwan, and wants to use the city as a base for its gay rights campaign there. The Kaohsiung Film Archive is located at 10 Hesi Rd, Yancheng District (鹽埕), Kaohsiung City. For details, visit gsrat.net.
■ TRANSPORT
‘Duck boat’ plans delayed
The Kaohsiung City Government might not be able to introduce amphibious tourist “duck boats” before the World Games next year, a city official said yesterday. Kaohsiung City Transportation Bureau Director Wang Kuo-tsai (王國材) said his bureau had appropriated nearly NT$60 million (US$1.8 million) for purchasing the boats to diversify the leisure activities for city residents and to boost tourism during the World Games. But he said plans to build two “duck boats” were not going well and it would be “difficult to debut them before the World Games open on July 16.” The bureau first opened a tender for the “ducks” — modeled after a World War II amphibious landing vehicle — on Nov. 26, but nobody came forward, and the bureau had to open a second tender on Thursday that will close on Dec. 8.
■ TRANSPORT
First ‘green’ station opened
Taiwan Railways Administration has inaugurated its first “green” station, which will provide transportation services using state-of-the-art, eco-friendly technologies, senior administrators said yesterday. At a ceremony to celebrate the inauguration of the renovated Dalin Station in Chiayi County, Taiwan Railways Administration Director-General Frank Fan (范植谷) praised the station as a “pastiche of history and modernity.” The station’s old building, which was preserved in the renovation project, was built in 1903 during the Japanese colonial rule.The new “green” service complex is equipped with all kinds of eco-friendly technology. Fan said the complex is a 100 percent “green building,” that not only fully relies on natural ventilation and natural light, but also recycles rainwater and converts sunlight into electricity. To reduce the pollution caused by the station itself and its operations, it is also equipped with noise reducing units and air purifiers that can reduce the impact of the exhaust of diesel locomotives, he said, adding that the new complex also adopted an “overpass station” design that places the service areas over the rails, to reduce the area occupied.
■ CRIME
Infamous gunman in custody
An infamous gunman and drug trafficker who fled Taiwan 14 years ago was escorted home from the Philippines yesterday, police said. Chen Kuan-yuan (陳冠源), 52, was arrested in 1993 for smuggling heroin into the country from Thailand and possessing firearms, the Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) said. Chen then fled to Southeast Asia using a fake passport in 1994, before the Kaohsiung District Court sentenced him in absentia to eight years and two months in prison, CIB officials said. In November 1998, Chen was arrested in the Philippines for threatening others with a gun and has since been held by Philippine authorities, the officials said. Efforts by Taiwanese police to have Chen sent back to the country were unsuccessful until a model for cooperation between the two nations’ law enforcement agencies was established recently, they said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater